Re: Re: Autodetect processing units with -j

See the last 5 paragraphs, starting with:   The MAKEFLAGS variable can also be useful if you want to have certain  options, such as ‘-k’ (see Summary of Options), set each time you run  make.    Tried to get what the `MAKEFLAGS' is but documentation, not manual is not very helpful. Info is better. I read it and still didn't get that as it seemed somewhat complex if not convoluted.  So I made a Makefile and this variable is neither simple nor easy,   ~~~  $ cat << EOF > Makefile  all:  @echo MAKEFLAGS=$(MAKEFLAGS)  EOF   $ make -n -k -j  echo MAKEFLAGS=nkj  $ make -n -k -j CC=gcc  echo MAKEFLAGS=nkj -- CC=gcc  $ make -n -k -j3  echo MAKEFLAGS=nk --jobserver-fds=3,4 -j  ~~~    > If one wants to add a default value because they know it will always  > work with their system they can easily add this to their ~/.profile:  >     export GNUMAKEFLAGS="$((2 * `nproc`))"   Don't like it.  Why would one want to 'taint' `.profile' or any other such 'intimate' file?   I would rather see it in ~/.config/gmake.conf or similar (name; in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME), where it was intended to control this particular program (here make), rather than pytting anything in `.profile'.  And it would be much easier if it looked like this:  ~~~  echo -n -k -j3 > ~/.config/gmake.conf  $ make  echo MAKEFLAGS=-n -k -j3  ~~~  where that would be prepended to command line resulting in control of 'default' command line options and overwriting them with command line itself.   ~~~  echo -n -k -j3 > ~/.config/gmake.conf  $ make -j4  echo MAKEFLAGS=-n -k -j4  ~~~   That's still just a prostethics for autodetect.    Speaking of autodetect, with big compilations, like compiler or binutils or similar, I don't use -j$(nproc), specially -j$((`nproc`*2)) as too many times it become unresponsive and without free thead couldn't even be tamed.  Since few slaps like that I use -j$((`nproc`-1)) even for a cost of slight slow down, as it's still less (cost/time) than rebooting system.  Still I use it only when expect to be long session, longer than few minutes, but that's OK - with rare cases like that I can spend two seconds typing more.    PS.  Make's git repo could be helpful - make a branch with the feature and let it to be tested. This way you can gather useful information from users and be prepared to easy merge in case it's accepted.